Conservatives: Keeping the Dark Ages alive
Harold Hark
8 August 2003

...the human race is divided into two distinct genotypes--neophobes, who reject new ideas and accept only what they have known all their lives, and neophiles, who love new things, change, invention, innovation.
Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminatus! Trilogy

If I believed in God, I would have to thank Him, Her, It, or Other for saving me from being born a conservative. What an embarrassing fate that would have been.

There are many degrees of conservatism, from those who are merely reluctant to accept changing mores to the full-blown reactionaries who become tyrants. But all conservatives are a superficial and ultimately cowardly lot. When not shrinking and cowering from everything life throws at them, they are lashing out with repression and violence to keep it at bay.

The conservative's solution to the overwhelming threat of what the next minute might bring is to resort to the measures employed in their heyday, the Dark Ages, when terror riding down from the castle on the hill was their reward for simple human ingenuity.

As in the good old days, they choose selective quotes from sacred texts to calm their fear of the future. In order to wage war on the present, they blithely blaspheme the exhortations of their prophets by twisting their words into contexts that were never meant and enlisting them as mascots for slaughter.

Today humanity is once again suffering under their dead weight. They are unfettered on the world stage, and in their shallow understanding of the complexities life brings, they strut with the illusory invincibility of a schoolyard bully. And the ululating mob, fearing the force of a few as always, is once again prostrated in obeisance.

We can see the prostrated all around us. They are our neighbours, our relatives, our friends. With the polarisation effected by John Howard's conservative government of the lowest common denominator, we are suddenly confronted with a determined and self-centred indifference to crimes against humanity in those who have always been close to us. Suddenly they look and sound like aliens. Or worse. Like collaborators in the ultimate betrayal of their own kind.

For how could they otherwise accept the caging of children on behalf of national security? How could they accept the pathological lies of a leader whom they know to be lying, but, because he is giving them a few more dollars to further their lifestyle choices by taking from the poor, do not care?

How could these people, whom we know to be decent parents whose children we love as our own, continue to believe that those less fortunate would intentionally throw their own children into the ocean, for any reason? Is this the triumphant disconnection John Howard has wedged between the hearts and minds of Australians?

How can they not see through the Government's Orwellian subterfuge of claiming left wing bias while repeatedly underfunding the ABC, the sole purpose of which is to turn the national broadcaster into a mouthpiece for its right wing propaganda? And at their (taxpayer's) expense!

How could they accept the heretofore unheard of invasion of a sovereign state, a state whose leader was admittedly a tyrant, but only one tyrant among many, and who was in no way a threat to Australia? How can they accept that the invasion was conducted on false intelligence that their lying leader knew was false. How can they talk of "humanitarian dividends" when thousands have died based on that false information?

What has happened to turn Australians into a herd of deaf, dumb and blind grazers?

The answer of course is that arch-conservative, John Howard. Make no mistake, his only claim to being radical is in defects of character. He is one of those conservatives who every day gets closer in degree to the full-blown tyrant.

One of the keys to John Howard's success is his ability to pry open the dark side of human nature, the chaotic, unconscious Shadow, where suspicion and intolerance reside. A pitiable species we are indeed, to still be prey to the primordial, conservative instincts he represents.

For the conservative mistrusts everything that moves. The threat of change, of difference, is a constant source of terror, and the only successful preventative is to restrict, to ban, to abolish, to arrest, to jail, to execute.

Freedom itself is a threat to the conservative. The less freedom people have, especially the freedom to increase their intelligence, the safer it will be for the coward who wants life reduced to a tolerable stasis.

In effect, the conservative temperament longs for death. Life is just too hard to deal with. It is the ultimate threat. That's why the fanatics among them long for their version of Armageddon. The Apocalypse represents salvation from life's unpredictability.

Besides religion-based repression, the other great outlet for conservatism is business. Here the person whose grand vision is limited to the panoramic vistas contained in a splayed fingernail can find meaning. The accumulation of wealth, great or small, by the simple, unthreatening addition and subtraction of dollars and cents becomes the be all and end all for those who are happy to use but a few neurons out of the endless billions that the "God" they pay lip service to has seen fit to put in their brains.

When you realise that humanity has always been ruled by organised religion and the business class and not by philosophers or mystics or scientists or artists, then the full weight of despair begins to set in.

Today we are seeing the collusion of religious conservatism and corporate hegemony as never before. Where once indigenous civilisations flourished in pockets untouched by the local rule of God Inc, that rule now extends to every nook and cranny of the world.

In George W. Bush we are seeing what his own band of fundamentalists would have once called the "anti-Christ". A loose definition could be given thus: he who rules the world in Jesus' name by impairing normal intellectual growth until overthrown by the second coming of Christ.

To be fair to Jesus, it would seem more appropriate to call fundamentalist Christians a collective "anti-Christ". And then forget all about it.

All things must come to an end. And while it is entirely possible that the atavism unleashed by George W. Bush could bring about such a pathetic denouement to our troubled species, we will probably survive this latest conservative attempt to stop the world because it is just too frightening.

You have to wonder why the rest of us got stuck with them. Is earth a planet of spiritual criminals? Are we serving sentences on a prison planet for having committed ethical and/or spiritual crimes in some other, more advanced realm? And are the George W. Bush's and John Howard's and their ilk nothing more than our jailers?

A weird thought, no doubt. But that's just the kind of thinking the brain is capable of. Don't forget, the sun used to revolve around a flat earth. It still would, if the conservatives had had their way.

Talk about morphic resonance! Six days after the above was written, the following report appeared in The Age newspaper: American academics get into the right mind. It refers to a study published in the May 2003 edition of the Psychological Bulletin, "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition", in which the authors make the following observations (These quotes are from the newspaper article, as the original study is not available online.):

• conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity.

• The reports four authors linked Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and Rush Limbaugh, arguing that all suffered from the same affliction. They see George W. Bush as a texbook case, citing his preference for moral certainty and dislike of nuance. "This intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic cliches and stereotypes."

By inserting the title of the study in Google, you will come up with many responses to it.

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